Francisco Brines: The light of words

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Palabras a la oscuridad (1966) is a central book in Francisco Brines’ literary work. His voice and his poetic world appear perfectly outlined in its pages for the first time.This is so because the book adopts a tone of biographical fiction that creates an intimacy with the reader, and because it accounts for a series of experiences, situations and places that the poet will repeatedly return to in his later books: the house and the landscape of Elca, his outlook of the Mediterranean, which makes him a poet with classical and humanist roots, his sojourn in Oxford, his travels through Italy and Greece, in which life and art, time and space, are deliberately mixed and confused, and, finally, the transcendental love episode that will mark his entire sentimental life. But Brines’s style, apparently serene and elegiac, is in turn complex when he enters temporal labyrinths that produce confusion in the identity and existence of the poet, as well as in his readers.Then the elegiac poet becomes a metaphysical poet.
KEY WORDS: Francisco Brines; Palabras a la oscuridad; biographical fiction; elegiac poetry; metaphysical poetry.